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Who Ended Slavery?

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Here is a fact so large it is easy to walk straight past. For almost the whole of recorded history, in almost every civilisation on every inhabited continent, one human being owning another was not a scandal, not a debate, and not even a question. It was simply how the world worked. The sociologist Rodney Stark puts the scale of it bluntly: “all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies”—Greece and Rome, the Islamic caliphates, the empires of West Africa, the Aztec and the Inca, the kingdoms of Asia.1 Slavery is not the aberration that needs explaining. Abolition is.

We forget this because we have inherited the answer and lost the memory of the question. The conviction that no human being may be owned—that a person is not a thing—feels to us like a moral floor, something any decent mind can simply see. It is not. It is a discovery, and a late and bitterly contested one. So the honest question is not “why did slavery finally end?” but “where on earth did anyone get the idea that it should?” This essay follows that idea to its home—and refuses, at every step, to tidy up the part of the story that shames the people telling it.

Say the guilt first

Because the ugliest chapter belongs to Christians, and any account that saves it for a footnote has already failed. Between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth, more than twelve million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic into bondage, in ships owned and captained and insured overwhelmingly by baptised Christians, to be worked on plantations owned by baptised Christians, in an economy that made Christian nations rich.2 The trade was defended from pulpits and in learned treatises. When Spanish theologians debated whether the peoples of the Americas could rightly be enslaved, the case for enslaving them was built on Aristotle's doctrine that some men are “slaves by nature”—and it was made by a Christian scholar, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, against another Christian, the friar Bartolomé de las Casas, who spent his life opposing it.3 This is not a stain at the edge of the picture. It is evil with a capital E, industrial in scale, and it was done by the church's own.

There is a move available here that must be refused before it is reached for. One could note that the very standard by which we now condemn the slave trade—the equal, unownable worth of every person—is itself largely a Christian inheritance, and let that observation soften the crime. It does not soften it. If anything it deepens it. The evil of Christian slaveholding is not lessened but aggravated by being done in the name of a faith that carried the very standard by which we judge it. Where a conviction came from and whether its bearers obeyed it are two different questions, and being handed the standard is an aggravating circumstance for the person who breaks it, never a mitigating one.4 Hold that firmly, and the positive case can be told without flinching—because it is not an excuse.

The abolition nobody remembers

The positive case is this: chattel slavery has been abolished not once but twice in the history of the West, and both times the church supplied indispensable pressure—decisively so in the second case, and as one important strand among several in the first. The first abolition is almost entirely forgotten.

Its most striking single voice is Gregory of Nyssa, a bishop in Cappadocia, who around the year 379 preached a sermon on Ecclesiastes that turns aside to attack slave-owning with a fury without parallel in the ancient world. Reading the line where the Preacher boasts of acquiring slaves, Gregory rounds on the very idea: to price a human being is to set a value on the one creature made in God's image, whom the whole earth could not buy; who dares to own what belongs to God alone? It is the fiercest condemnation of the institution of slavery to survive from antiquity.5 Two honesties are owed about it. Gregory was an outlier even among Christians—most Fathers accepted slavery and merely urged masters to kindness—and his sermon is a meditation on the vanity of possessions, not a political programme; he did not call for abolition as law. The seed is there; the harvest is centuries away.

And yet the harvest came. As the Roman order dissolved, so did the chattel slavery that had underpinned it. Across the early-medieval centuries the slave of antiquity gave way to the serf, and by the high Middle Ages outright ownership of persons had largely faded from the northern kingdoms; in England it was effectively gone by 1200.6 The causes were many and are debated—economic and technological change did much of the work, and no honest account makes the church the sole engine. But one strand was religious and specific: it became steadily harder to hold as property a person you baptised, communed beside, and confessed to be a brother or sister in Christ. Slavery did not end because someone proved it wrong; it eroded, in part, under the pressure of a sacrament. Then, after 1492, the Atlantic economy revived it on a scale the ancient world never dreamed of—which is exactly why the second abolition had to be fought all over again.

The campaign that had to be organised

That second fight is the one we half-remember. In May 1787 twelve men met in a London printing shop and founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. Nine were Quakers; three were Anglicans, among them Granville Sharp and the tireless evidence-gatherer Thomas Clarkson. In Parliament their cause found its voice in William Wilberforce, an evangelical convert, and around him gathered the “Clapham Sect” of reforming Christians.7 Their methods invented modern activism: the mass petition, the consumer boycott of slave-grown sugar, the lecture tour, and the era’s most widely reproduced protest image—Josiah Wedgwood's medallion of a kneeling, chained African under the words “Am I not a man and a brother?”8 The formerly enslaved spoke for themselves: Olaudah Equiano's best-selling Narrative framed its indictment in frankly Christian terms. It took decades. The trade was outlawed by Britain in 1807; the Act abolishing slavery itself across most of the Empire passed the Commons days before Wilberforce died in 1833, and took effect the following year.9

How central was the faith to all this? David Brion Davis, the pre-eminent modern historian of New World slavery and no apologist for the church, judged that “religion was the central concern of all the British abolitionist leaders,” and that the fall of New World slavery could not have occurred without the movements they built.10 The historian Alec Ryrie reaches the same verdict: Britain gave up one of the most lucrative pillars of its own empire because of a movement that was, at its root, a religious one—and, against the older thesis that abolition merely followed slavery’s declining profits, did so while the trade was still paying.11

But the story must not be told as a providential pageant, and the best historians do not tell it that way. Christopher Leslie Brown's Moral Capital is the careful account, and it complicates the heroism. Quaker and evangelical objections to slavery had existed for generations without ending anything; what changed in the 1780s was as much political as spiritual. Having just lost the American colonies, Britain found in abolition a way to recover a sense of national virtue. Religious conviction, Brown argues, was necessary to the campaign and was not by itself sufficient; it needed a particular imperial moment to become law.12 And the enslaved were never merely waiting to be freed. The revolution in Haiti and the great slave risings in the Caribbean forced the question onto the empire as insistently as any committee in London.13 The right claim is therefore modest and durable: Christian conviction was an indispensable ingredient in a particular combination—not a lone cause, and not a guarantee.

The hardest objection: isn't the Bible pro-slavery?

Here the sceptic has a real case, and it deserves its strongest form. The Bible nowhere commands the abolition of slavery. The law of Moses regulates it. The New Testament household codes tell slaves to obey their masters (Ephesians 6:5; Colossians 3:22), and to do so even under unjust suffering (1 Peter 2:18). Paul sends the runaway Onesimus back to his owner (Philemon 12). For eighteen centuries most Christians read all this as permission, and the most sophisticated defences of slavery ever written—learned, biblical, and produced in quantity—came from Christian clergy. An honest reader has to grant that when the isolated proof-texts are set side by side, the pro-slavery side had the easier of them. This is not a caricature; it is the situation the American churches actually faced.

The reply is not to pretend the difficulty away. It is to notice who found the answer. The people best placed to test whether the Bible was a slaveholder's book were the enslaved who read it—and overwhelmingly they did not find in it their own justification. They found the opposite. They found a God who heard slaves groaning in Egypt and broke an empire to free them. They found, buried in the same law that regulated servitude, a capital charge against the whole Atlantic trade: “Whoever steals a man and sells him… shall be put to death” (Exodus 21:16)—and the New Testament echo that lists “enslavers”—andrapodistai, slave-traders—among the lawless whom the law exists to condemn (1 Timothy 1:10).14 The trade that built the plantations stood condemned by the text its defenders were quoting.

No one saw this more clearly than Frederick Douglass, who was born into slavery and became one of its greatest preacher-adversaries. Douglass drew a line no proof-text could blur: between “the slaveholding religion of this land” and “the Christianity of Christ,” which he called as opposite as heaven and hell. The churches that sanctified slavery he named without mercy—they had, he wrote, made themselves “the bulwark of American slavery.” Writing to his own devout former master, he confessed that a slaveholder never seemed to him “so completely an agent of hell” as when he looked on his own children and thought of them in bondage—and yet Douglass still refused to hate the man, addressing him to the end as a fellow human being and not as an enemy.15 That refusal is the whole point: he condemned the slaveholder's religion in the name of the slaveholder's own Scripture. The enslaved church sang the same conviction it could not always print—the spirituals set their hope in Moses at the Red Sea and in the crucified Christ who suffered as they suffered, reading the Bible, in the black theologian Howard Thurman's phrase, as the book that redeemed the very faith the master had profaned.16 Rebecca McLaughlin captures the paradox: if slavery is the founding sin of America, the black church that rose out of it may be the nearest thing to a miracle.17

So the exegetical question was not simple, and it would be dishonest to say it was. Mark Noll's study of the American churches shows the Civil War arriving as a genuine crisis of biblical interpretation, with Scripture marshalled on both sides and no quick knockdown available to either.18 What the abolitionist reading had was not a single decisive verse but the whole: creation in the image of God, the Exodus, the man-stealer's condemnation, the levelling of “neither slave nor free” in Christ (Galatians 3:28), and the plain golden rule—the canon read entire, running against an institution its parts merely tolerated. The same faith that slaveholders abused is the faith that armed both the abolitionist and the slave who out-read him. And it was the abolitionist reading that carried the image of God all the way to its conclusion.

What this does and does not settle

None of this proves Christianity true. That a movement did great good is no argument that its beliefs are correct; a false faith could inspire a noble campaign, and the case for the resurrection—where the truth of the faith actually rests—is made elsewhere in this library, not here. And the church's complicity in slavery was real, vast, and grievous, and is not cancelled by the abolitionists any more than a debt is cancelled by a later gift.

The claim is narrower, and it is enough. The conviction that every human being is unownable was not humanity's default; it was a minority report in world history, and it found a settled home in the doctrine that each person bears the image of God. The Enlightenment produced its own abolitionists too—Condorcet, Thomas Paine, the French amis des noirs—and revolutionary France abolished slavery in 1794; whether that secular conviction was itself an inheritance of the Christian claim it had begun to forget is a real and contested question. What is not in doubt is that the Anglo-American movement that actually dismantled the Atlantic system was, at its root, a religious one. The conviction had to be discovered, and then it had to be turned, painfully, against the very Christians who were breaking it. That is what happened. Slavery was as old as civilisation and as universal as the human heart's appetite for advantage; the idea that it was an abomination had to be born somewhere, and it was substantially born here.

So “who ended slavery?” has no tidy single name. Not the church, whose hands are bloody. Not the enslaved alone, though they forced it. Not the politics alone, though they closed it. It was, more than anything, a conviction—that a person is not a thing because a person is made in the image of God—held at last against the people who had betrayed it worst. The believer can take from that no boast, only a sober gratitude: that the faith was, in the end, truer than its followers, and that the standard it handed the world proved strong enough to judge and to break the sin the church itself had helped commit.

Footnotes

  1. Rodney Stark, The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion (New York: HarperOne, 2011), 291: “all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies—even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus's voyage.” Stark's larger claim, that Christendom was the one civilisation to reject bondage, is a stronger and more contested one; the bare universality of slavery quoted here is not disputed.
  2. On the scale and ownership of the trade, Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade: The Story of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997); the modern Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (slavevoyages.org) estimates roughly 12.5 million Africans embarked. That the great majority of owners, traders and investors were professing Christians is not in serious dispute.
  3. Aristotle, Politics 1.4–7 (1253b–1255b), on natural slavery. On the Valladolid debate of 1550–1551, in which Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda invoked Aristotelian natural slavery to justify the enslavement of indigenous Americans and the Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas opposed him, see Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (London: Little, Brown, 2019), and Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1959).
  4. This is the “firewall” stated more fully in the companion essay Did Christianity Change the World?: where a moral standard came from and whether its holders obeyed it are logically independent, and being handed the standard aggravates rather than mitigates the failure to keep it.
  5. Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on Ecclesiastes 4 (In Ecclesiasten Homiliae IV), on Ecclesiastes 2:7; English translation in Stuart George Hall, ed., Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on Ecclesiastes (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993). The homily is usually dated to c. 379. Scholars debate how far it is an “abolitionist” text: it is the fiercest surviving patristic attack on the institution itself, but its frame is a sermon on the vanity of possessions rather than a call for legal abolition, and Gregory is an outlier among the Fathers, most of whom accepted slavery while urging humane treatment. See Chris L. de Wet, Preaching Bondage: John Chrysostom and the Discourse of Slavery in Early Christianity (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015), for the wider patristic picture.
  6. On the transformation of ancient slavery into medieval serfdom — a large and debated field — see Marc Bloch, Slavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages, trans. William R. Beer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975). Chattel ownership of persons had largely faded from the northern kingdoms by the high Middle Ages and was effectively gone from England by c. 1200. Economic and technological factors did much of the work; the sacramental factor stressed here (baptism and shared communion making ownership of a fellow member harder to sustain) is one strand among several, not a monocause.
  7. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2006); Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (London, 1789). The Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in London in May 1787 by nine Quakers and three Anglicans, including Granville Sharp and Thomas Clarkson; Wilberforce became its parliamentary leader and the Clapham circle coalesced through the 1790s.
  8. The medallion was designed for the Society by Josiah Wedgwood in 1787, depicting a kneeling, chained African with the motto “Am I not a man and a brother?” It became the era's most widely reproduced protest image.
  9. The Slave Trade Act 1807 abolished the trade throughout the British Empire; the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 abolished slavery itself across most of the Empire, taking effect in 1834. Wilberforce died on 29 July 1833, three days after the bill's decisive passage through the Commons.
  10. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), (“religion was the central concern of all the British abolitionist leaders”), and the judgment that the fall of New World slavery could not have occurred without the abolitionist movements; see also his Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 250–267, 331. Davis was the leading historian of Atlantic slavery of his generation and was not writing as a Christian apologist.
  11. Alec Ryrie, Protestants: The Faith That Made the Modern World (New York: Viking, 2017), argues that Britain abandoned one of the most profitable props of its own empire because of a movement that was fundamentally religious in origin. Ryrie is equally candid that Protestants were deeply implicated in slavery before they turned against it—on both sides of the argument.
  12. Brown, Moral Capital, which explains the emergence of organised abolitionism in the 1780s by the imperial crisis following the loss of the American colonies and the pursuit of national moral standing, treating the religious networks as necessary raw material rather than a sufficient cause.
  13. On the agency of the enslaved, C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938), together with the wider literature on slave resistance in the British Caribbean.
  14. Exodus 21:16 (ESV): “Whoever steals a man and sells him, and anyone found in possession of him, shall be put to death.” 1 Timothy 1:10 lists andrapodistais (kidnappers, slave-traders, “enslavers,” ESV) among those contrary to sound doctrine. Both texts bear directly on the man-stealing trade that the 1787 campaign was formed to end.
  15. Frederick Douglass distinguished “the slaveholding religion of this land” from “the Christianity of Christ” in the Appendix to his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1845); the charge that the church “has made itself the bulwark of American slavery” is from his oration “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (Rochester, 5 July 1852). The phrase “agent of hell” is from Douglass's open “Letter to My Old Master, Thomas Auld” (The North Star, 8 September 1848), which closes by insisting he remains Auld's fellow-man and not his slave. Douglass was a licensed preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
  16. On the spirituals' identification with the Exodus and the suffering Christ, and Howard Thurman's reading of the Bible as reclaimed by the enslaved from those who had abused it, see James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), esp. ch. 4 on Thurman; and Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1949). The characterisation here paraphrases Thurman and Cone rather than quoting a single line verbatim.
  17. Rebecca McLaughlin, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion (Wheaton: Crossway, 2019), ch. 10, on slavery, the black church, and the distinction between the slaveholders' Christianity and the faith of the enslaved. The sentence here paraphrases her argument.
  18. Mark A. Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), arguing that the pro-slavery reading held the more straightforward interpretation of the isolated texts and that this was itself a crisis for American biblical interpretation. Noll later concluded, in America's Book (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), that the antislavery argument from the canon read whole should have carried the day.

Bibliography & further reading

Frequently asked questions

Didn't Christians run the slave trade? How can you credit Christianity with ending it?

Both are true, and the essay states the guilt first and plainly: the Atlantic trade shipped more than twelve million Africans under overwhelmingly Christian ownership, and Christians defended slavery from Scripture for centuries. That record is not lessened by abolition—if anything it is aggravated, because the church supplied the very standard it broke. The narrower, defensible claim is that the conviction that no human may be owned found a settled home in the image of God, and that abolition, when it came, was driven decisively by Christians turning that conviction against Christian slaveholders. Guilt and achievement are both real; neither cancels the other.

But the Bible never abolishes slavery—doesn't that settle it?

The Bible regulates slavery rather than banning it, and the New Testament household codes tell slaves to obey their masters; honesty requires granting that the isolated proof-texts favoured the slaveholders, which is why the American churches faced a genuine crisis of interpretation. The reply is not to deny this but to notice who answered it: the enslaved themselves, reading the same book, found the Exodus, the death-penalty against man-stealing (Exodus 21:16), the condemnation of slave-traders (1 Timothy 1:10), and “neither slave nor free” in Christ. Read whole, the canon runs against an institution its parts merely tolerate—the deeper and truer reading, even if, as Noll shows, in America it took a war rather than an argument to settle the matter.

Does the fact that Christians ended slavery prove Christianity is true?

No, and the essay refuses that inference explicitly. A movement can do enormous good and still rest on false beliefs; social achievement is not evidence about God. The case for the truth of Christianity rests on the resurrection and is argued elsewhere in this library, not here. What the history of abolition does show is narrower: that the equal, unownable worth of every person was not humanity's default assumption but a hard-won conviction with a traceable home—and that it had to be turned against the church's own failures before it won.

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